Rush's race news deflates with the rise of 'balloon boy'

When I started this column, I was thinking about whether Rush Limbaugh, in his Thursday moaning about "Obama's America," intentionally called them "the dark days" as a shout-out to any racist listeners upset that the radio star's long history of racial comments cost him a chance to buy into an NFL team this week.

Race is an important issue in the suburbs, and I wanted to talk about how racially charged words matter when someone such as Limbaugh uses them over and over again.

"He's been on the radar for a long time," says Jim Naureckas, who grew up in Libertyville and is a co-author of the 1995 book, "The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error."

Paying attention to Limbaugh, the media and race is part of Naureckas' duty in his job as editor of Extra!, a media criticism journal produced by the national watchdog group FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting at www.fair.org).

"The white resentment of the civil rights movement has been major fuel for the conservative movement going on for half a century now," Naureckas says. But the heat that forced Limbaugh out of a group planning to buy an NFL team wasn't a conservative/liberal statement.

"Politics are one thing, and insulting an ethnic group is another thing," Naureckas says. During his long and successful career, Limbaugh once told a black caller to "take that bone out of your nose," asserted that "all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson," and referred to President Barack Obama as "the little black man-child."

"When you use language like that, it's not about Barack Obama, or about Democratic and Republican policies," Naureckas notes.

I had high hopes that Limbaugh's situation might elevate some thoughtful conversations about race, racism and the words we use. Instead, the media moved on to the video of a helium balloon floating above Colorado. The voice coming out of my car radio told me to pray for the little boy thought to be in the balloon basket or to have fallen to a grisly death along the way. Just like that, hopes of a thoughtful, informational discussion of race were deflated.

"The 24-hour cable news has been a surprisingly bad development for our informational culture, and 'balloon boy' is a perfect example of that," Naureckas says. "You get better ratings covering one sensational story all day long."

Any one channel had fewer than 1 percent of Americans watching the spectacle, but the "balloon boy" story (complete with updates and video of the kid throwing up twice during Friday's national TV interviews) sure feels like the most important story of the day.

"It gives journalists the feeling that what's important is what's on CNN or Fox News," Naureckas says. So now, Falcon "Balloon Boy" Heene probably has greater name-recognition than Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

I like the luxury of thinking and reporting a bit before writing, even if it seems old-fashioned in a 24-hour news and opinion cycle. I talk with Naureckas about news, the influence of special interests, the way you maybe shouldn't give a video you see on the Internet any more credence than you did that Borat movie, and the responsibility of journalists to do more than simply pass along whatever we hear or see.

"If that were the job of a journalist, we could do away with that job," Naureckas says.

To compete in today's world, where gobs of information arrives on a cell phone, a newspaper needs to find something it does well enough to draw readers who can't find whatever that is somewhere else, Naureckas says.

That ends today's musings on race, balloon boy, news and the media. But you might want to check out our high school football stories, photographs and videos.